Trouble on Paradise: an ExForce novella (ExForce novellas Book 1) Read online

  Trouble on Paradise

  An ExForce novella

  By Craig Alanson

  Text copyright © 2016 Craig Alanson

  All Rights Reserved

  Thanks to my dedicated team of ‘beta readers’:

  Ross Bumpass

  John Reed

  Mick Wilson

  Janet Wolfenden

  Cover by Melinda Burt

  [email protected]

  And thanks to Bruce Willoughby Mann for practical joke ideas, from his book:

  God Dammit Louise!

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  CHAPTER ONE

  Three days after Skippy used maser cannon projectors to destroy the Kristang battlegroup at Paradise

  “All zPhones in the bag,” Staff Sergeant Surmacz pointed to the sack he held with one hand. A trickle of sweat ran down his forehead and into his left eye; the salt stung his eye. He wiped it away with the back of his free hand, silently cursing the steaming jungle heat of Lemuria, the southern continent where the Ruhar had dumped almost all humans on Paradise. Dumped us here, he thought bitterly, to get us out of the way. Out of sight, and out of mind for the Ruhar civilian population. Stuck in Lemuria, without transportation, without weapons, where primitive humans could not cause problems for the Ruhar government. Far enough away so humans could not threaten the native Ruhar. The Ruhar government had been right about that, when Ruhar starships completely dominated the skies.

  And then a Kristang battlegroup arrived in orbit, and everything had changed. Those humans who had remained loyal to the Kristang had renewed hope of the Ruhar being forced to leave Paradise. That happy situation ended three days ago, when giant maser cannons no one had known about had blasted most of the Kristang ships apart, and thrown the strategic situation on the planet into chaos. A chaos that Staff Sergeant Surmacz and his fellow Keepers of the Faith hoped to exploit, to assure the Ruhar did not regain control over the planet humans called Paradise.

  “I turned it off, Sergeant.” Eric Koblenz waved his zPhone, reluctant to part with his only means of communications beyond shouting range.

  “In the bag,” Surmacz insisted. “And that wasn’t a suggestion soldier, it was an order. You think pressing the ‘Off’ button really kills the power to a zPhone?”

  Eric cast a guilty look at his zPhone. “The light turns off. I should-”

  “This is why you shouldn’t do the thinking around here, Koblenz,” Surmacz tilted his head as if he were speaking to a young and particularly stupid child. “This is alien tech, we don’t understand anything about it. You’ve got a Kristang phone using a Ruhar network. Even if the damned hamsters haven’t figured out how to load tracking software into these things, I can guarantee the lizards were listening to everything we said and wherever we went, whether we turned it off or not. Put it in the bag.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Koblenz admitted and handed the phone to the sergeant.

  Surmacz took the zPhone, checked that it was powered down, and dropped it in the bag. “When’s the last time you charged it?”

  Koblenz looked surprised by the question. “Never. The lowest it ever showed was an 86% charge.”

  “And you’ve had it since Camp Alpha?” Surmacz didn’t wait for an answer. “These things pick up energy from motion, from the sun, from your body’s electrical field, even from the magnetic field of the planet. We don’t ever need to plug them in to keep them charged. That tells me that we humans don’t understand this tech at all. We’re leaving these here. You heard the orders,” he meant word passed down from the informal leadership of the Keeper movement. “From now on, communications are voice only, person to person. Nothing electronic, and nothing in writing. Our enemy,” he meant the Ruhar, “can hack any signal we transmit, and crack any encryption we use. Great, that’s all of them,” Surmacz took the last zPhone, cinched the bag shut and dropped it under a bush. The zPhones were waterproof, he didn’t need to worry about them. “Now, we get out of these uniforms. Strip off everything except shorts, boots and socks.” He took off his own top.

  Eric Koblenz didn’t like the idea of walking through the jungle of Lemuria almost naked. “We’re going into this op in our underwear?”

  “No, Private Koblenz,” Surmacz pointed to a trio of dufflebags on the floor. “There’s good, honest homemade pants and shirts in those dufflebags, we’ll be wearing those. These uniforms are too likely to have tracers attached to them, so they’re staying behind.”

  A soldier named Markey fingered the collar of his uniform top suspiciously. “Sewn into the collars?” He guessed.

  Sergeant Surmacz shook his head. “No, that’s what we would have to do. With the tech available to hamsters, they could weave nanofibers directly into the fabric anywhere.”

  “If they can track us, could they be listening to us now?” Markey hurried to get his top and pants off, flinging them across the hut.

  “UNEF Intel doesn’t think the hamsters are doing that, and that is one thing Keeper leadership trusts UNEF Intel to tell the truth about,” Surmacz shook his head. “Since we all usually carry zPhones everywhere we go, the hamsters have no need of any other way to listen to us. They might also be tracing us with our socks or underwear,” he gave a rueful grin, “or our boots. That’s a risk we’ll have to take.”

  “I’m happy to get out of the UNEF gear,” Markey grimaced. Some of them, Markey included, had all already removed the UNEF patches from their uniforms when UNEF Command on Paradise traitorously considered declaring allegiance to the Ruhar. The Keeper movement got a significant boost three days before, when mysterious maser cannons blasted the Kristang battlegroup and chased the remaining ships away from Paradise! Rumors were flying around that humans, UNEF, were involved somehow in a treacherous sneak attack on humanity’s allies. That had been the final straw for many people who were on the fence about joining the Keeper movement, or were lukewarm about their commitment to the Keeper cause. For humans to take up arms, against the species who protected Earth from the Ruhar, was too much for the Keepers not to take action. Direct action. It was time, Keeper leaders had declared in clandestine meetings, to act. An attack on UNEF headquarters? That idea had been discarded because humans killing humans was not likely to impress the Kristang. And because not even the most fanatical Keeper wanted to kill other humans. The best option for Keeper action would be to hit the Ruhar directly, but since humans were isolated on the southern continent of Lemuria, hitting the Ruhar was impractical. Keeper leadership was at a loss for ideas, until UNEF received notice from the Ruhar that there were several potential projector sites on Lemuria. The Ruhar would be investigating, and working to reactivate, projectors on Lemuria. What they wanted UNEF to do was to stay the hell out of their way. Rumor had it that neither the Ruhar nor the Kristang controlled the projector network, which UNEF HQ was trying to make sense of. According to another rumor, there were dozens of other projectors sites around the planet that neither the Ruhar nor Kristang had found yet; both sides were frantically deep scanning the surface to find the hidden projectors.

  Immediately following the Ruhar message, the Kristang had sent a message to UNEF command, stating that they also would be flying over Lemuria. The Kristang would be trying to find and reactivate projectors for their own use, and trying to se
ize control of, or destroy projectors that were under Ruhar control. The Kristang had angrily demanded that their human UNEF allies resist the Ruhar, and assist Kristang efforts to take control of projectors. UNEF Command responded to both Ruhar and Kristang that humans were effectively neutrals in the current fight; an easy decision since unarmed humans couldn’t do much anyway.

  It was an easy decision for the Keepers also. They did not have to find a way to travel all the way to the northern continent to hit a Ruhar target, the Ruhar were coming to them in Lemuria! According to the Kristang, the Ruhar had identified a hidden projector site less than forty miles from a UNEF village, on the western edge of UNEF territory. The Ruhar had flown a team there to excavate the site and bring the projector back online, and that was expected to take at least several days. During that time, the Ruhar team on the surface would be vulnerable. This was the big opportunity the Keepers had been looking for; a chance to hit the Ruhar directly and do something useful to help their Kristang allies. If Keepers could attack the projector site, they could delay the Ruhar effort to reactivate the weapon. Possibly even force the Ruhar to retreat long enough for the Kristang to arrive and take over. Attacking the Ruhar at the closest projector site would be the most useful action humans could perform on Paradise, since the time Sergeant Bishop and his team shot down a pair of Ruhar Whale dropships. No way were the Keepers going to miss what was likely to be a one-time-only opportunity. Staff Sergeant Surmacz had been contacted by Keeper leadership; the message was written in code on paper and hand delivered by courier. Surmacz burned the paper immediately after reading it. Then he gathered a team of volunteers. Their mission, and the mission of four other similar teams, was not to attack the Ruhar yet. They couldn’t attack effectively, as they had no weapons other than spears, bows and arrows, and shovels with sharpened blades. Surmacz’s mission was simple: a raid on a UNEF security patrol to acquire weapons. Once the Keepers had weapons, real weapons like M-4 rifles, some of the Keepers would create chaos and distractions, while the main team hit the Ruhar projector site.

  When the team was dressed in their new clothes that had been hand-made from old tents and whatever other fabric was available, Surmacz led them out the back of the hut and straight into the jungle. There was a cache less than half a mile inside the jungle, with such weapons as were available, and backpacks that were distressingly light on food. They had packs of dehydrated soup made from vegetables and fruit, some dried fruit, and bread that had been baked hard as a cracker. In the heat and humidity of the jungle, Surmacz expected even the tough bread to start going bad quickly. No matter, they had enough food for the planned length of their mission plus two days, on lean rations. They could manage.

  “You heard?” Captain Chisolm asked as he burst through the door of the hut. He removed his camouflage patrol cap and shook it in the doorway to get rid of the water from the jungle rainstorm. Chisolm was careful with the cap; it was the only one he had left. No more supplies were coming from Earth, UNEF HQ on Paradise was not issuing any gear to Keepers like him.

  “Yes, Sir,” Sergeant Robinson acknowledged, holding up his zPhone. “The message was directed at us,” he meant the Keeper village, “by now the whole planet will have heard. Are we going, Captain?”

  “I am. This will be volunteers only, Sergeant. The Kristang asked for fifty men, men only,” he grimaced at the need to comply with their allies’ prohibition against women in combat. Against women in pretty much any military role. There weren’t many women in the village; as a percentage of inhabitants, the Keeper villages had even less women than the general UNEF population. But excluding women made it more difficult for Chisolm to round up enough volunteers. “My guess is fifty of us is the max they can cram aboard whatever transport they’re sending.” After the massive air battle now called The Great Paradise Furball several days ago, neither side had enough aircraft to establish air superiority, and barely even enough to support ground troops.

  “Sir,” Robinson glanced away, then met the Captain’s eyes. “Do you believe the Kristang? That they really need us to support an assault on a Ruhar projector site?”

  Chisolm’s eyes narrowed. Robinson was one of his most trusted, steady men. If Robinson was questioning their lizard-like allies, many others in the village were also likely having second thoughts. Declaring continued loyalty to the Kristang and disgust with UNEF was easy to say. Actually going into combat against the Ruhar was the real test of whether humans on Paradise would be Keepers of the Faith.

  “We’ve been lied to so many times, I’m questioning everything I’ve been told, Sir,” Robinson stated flatly. “We don’t have weapons, we’ve not been trained to fight alongside the Kristang, and we’ll be attacking a position the Ruhar will have had time to prepare for a static defense. The Kristang probably want to avoid damaging this projector, so we won’t be allowed to use artillery, which we don’t have anyway.”

  “The Kristang will provide weapons,” Chisolm said hopefully. The message had not included that detail. The message overall had been short in details, being devoted mostly to taunting and insulting humans as being wholly unworthy of being considered allies by the glorious Kristang. This, in a message that ordered the Keeper village to provide fifty volunteers. Captain Chisolm was determined to remain loyal to his original pledge to the Kristang; that didn’t mean he was not aware their communications skill could use some improvement. “The Kristang never trained us to fight alongside them, because they are super warriors; they never thought we would be of any use to them in combat. Humans are too short, too slow, too weak to keep up with Kristang troops. They gave us the evac mission here, because all we had to deal with was hamster civilians, and we almost screwed that up anyway.”

  Robinson nodded but he didn’t look happy. “I’ll go if you go, Sir. Scraping together fifty volunteers quickly might be a tall order. Most of these people haven’t done any combat training in a long time.”

  “None of us have,” Chisolm agreed. “We’ve been too busy trying to feed ourselves.” He almost added ‘no thanks to the Kristang’. “Talk to people, Sergeant, I’m going to meet with as many people as I can. Major Gomez wants as many volunteers as possible; it would be great if the entire village is waiting when the Kristang transport arrives. That’s in,” he checked his zPhone, “less than two hours.”

  When the Kristang transport arrived, it was trailing smoke from one engine, and set down heavily in the middle of a corn field, skidding and plowing up several meters of precious crops. If people had known the Kristang would treat a critical human food source so carelessly, there may have been even less than the forty seven volunteers waiting. The transport was distressingly small, Captain Chisolm did not see how fifty humans could possibly fit inside, nor how such an overloaded transport could manage to take off. Major Gomez, who would be staying behind because a tree had fallen and broken one of his legs, gave Captain Chisolm a questioning look. Then Gomez regained his composure and drew himself upright. His people were already uncertain about the situation; he could not show his own fears.

  The rear ramp of the transport swung down, and two Kristang in body armor panels stepped out, waving the waiting humans forward. The front rank hesitated until Major Gomez saluted them and pointed to the transport. Then, with a shout that was less loud and enthusiastic than Gomez hoped for, the front rank trotted forward and up the ramp.

  Gomez then turned and saluted Captain Chisolm. “Captain, good luck to you.”

  “I will return with my shield, or on it,” Chisolm said with grim determination.

  Gomez suppressed a frown at Chisolm’s melodramatics. “Just remember, Captain, your mission isn’t to win the battle for the Kristang; it is to demonstrate to our allies that humans are steadfast and reliable in combat. No one expects your men to take on the Ruhar by yourselves.”

  “Yes, Sir,” Chisolm’s expression reflected his excitement. He started to run forward, and turned to say something, but whatever sentiment he intended to convey was dr
owned out by the booming voice of a Kristang, amplified by the transport’s external speakers.

  “Human! We ordered fifty of your men to be provided to us. We count forty seven,” the translated voice still conveyed outrage.

  “We are,” Gomez looked around, mortified. He had ordered all other people not going with the Kristang to stay out of sight, but human nature being what it was, curiosity had gotten the better of many people. Gomez himself, with his right leg in a splint and him leaning on crutches, was clearly not capable of combat. The people peeking around huts, or lingering at the edge of the field, were not doing humanity any favors. What could he say? That some among the Keepers of the Faith did not want to go into battle with their patrons? “You have our finest-”

  “Give us three more, or we will take them from you!” The Kristang’s voice demanded. The two Kristang at the bottom of the ramp stopped urging humans aboard, and unslung their rifles.

  Gomez spoke as loudly as he could, hoping his people would respond. Since they had broken with UNEF, the Keepers had kept to a military hierarchy, but Gomez knew he really had only as much authority as his people wanted to give him. Ordering three people to their likely deaths was probably not within his power. “Keepers of the Faith! We need three true warriors to step up and prove that humans do not cower from the prospect of battle! Prove to the aliens who rescued our home planet from invasion! Three people!” There was movement at the edge of the field, people shuffling their feet and talking to each other, but no one had yet stepped forward. Gomez feared the two Kristang soldiers would charge across the field, grab three of his people and start shooting the others. He opened his mouth to openly plead for volunteers, but just then, three men who had been huddled and talking animatedly with each other, stepped forward and began slowly jogging across the field. Jogging as if at any moment, they would surrender to their fears and stop. “Warriors of Earth!” Gomez shouted. “We salute you!”